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Cancer

Cancer is a group of diseases caused by excessive cell growth. Roughly 15 million new cases of cancers are reported each year, and the disease is the cause of millions of deaths.

While there are over a 100 different types of cancers, a lot of them are caused by dysregulation of a class of proteins called kinases. Within the Folding@home consortium, the Pande, Chodera, and Shukla groups are all working together to try and understand the mechanism behind kinase activation. Ultimately we would like to translate what we learn from these simulations to the creation of new classes of specific anti-cancer drugs. In addition, with collaborators from the University of Washington, we are also investigating key mutations found in kinase patients in order to be able to predict, from patient sequences, the resulting behavior of the mutations and therefore the drugs that could be used for treatment.

The Chodera Lab at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is now running a series of projects to study the conformational dynamics of histone methyltransferases to aid in the rational design of new small molecule…